Breakthroughs

XX

Jake Featherston slouched down the dirt road toward Richmond at a pace that would have made him scream curses at any soldier using it. No one would scream curses at him, not now. He still wore his uniform, but he wasn’t a soldier any more. Along with most of the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia, he’d been mustered out and paid off and sent on his way with a pat on the head.

“Threw me out,” he snarled under his breath. “Threw us all out, so the War Department wouldn’t have to fret itself about feedin’ us or payin’ us any more. Payin’ us!” He snorted and slapped a pocket. Paper inside crinkled. They’d paid him off in banknotes, not real money. He wondered how far the notes would go when he tried spending them. Not far enough. He was already sure of that.

Dust rose from the pocket when he slapped it. A lot of paid-off soldiers-no, ex-soldiers-were on the road. Every time he took a step, dust kicked up from under his battered boots. Any time any of them took a step, dust kicked up. Thousands of men, millions of steps, a hell of a lot of dust.

“You’d think they’d want to keep a good artilleryman in the Army,” he muttered. He’d been plenty good enough to command a battery. But he hadn’t been good enough-no, the War Department hadn’t thought he was good enough-to get promoted past sergeant, or good enough to keep, either. “Well, to hell with Jeb Stuart, Jr. He can go down there and toast his toes with Jeb Stuart III.”

A Negro soldier trudging along the same road turned his head at the sound of Featherston’s voice. Jake stared unwinkingly back at him. In the days before things had gone to hell in the CSA, a couple of seconds of that look from a white man would have been plenty to make any black buck lower his eyes. Now the Negro, a big, burly fellow, tried to stare him down.

It didn’t work. Featherston might have been on the wiry side, but rage had kept him going during the war, and that rage hadn’t got any smaller now that the war was lost. It blazed out of him now, almost tangibly, and the colored soldier flinched away from it. Jake laughed. Instead of trying to start a fight, the Negro flinched again. “Do Jesus!” he said softly, and let Featherston pass.

That night, Featherston slept by the side of the road wrapped in a blanket, as he had slept by a lot of different roads in several blankets during the war. He had turned in his pistol when he was paid off. Again, no: he had turned in a pistol when he was paid off. He took his pistol out of his pack and set it where he could grab it in a hurry. The precaution proved needless; he slept undisturbed.

When morning woke him, he started walking again. He took the fifty-five miles from Fredericksburg to Richmond in three medium-easy days, not the two harsh ones he would have used if still in the Army. That meant he got into the Confederate capital this side of exhausted but empty as a cave: the men who’d moved faster had got what food there was on the road.

Richmond was full of dirty scarecrows in butternut. The gray-uniformed police seemed to have not a clue about what to do with so many men odds-on to be tougher and shorter-tempered than they were. The best answer they found was, as little as we possibly can. That struck Jake as showing better sense than he expected from police.

He went into a saloon to take advantage of its free-lunch spread. The meal-ham and deviled eggs and pickles and salted peanuts and other thirst-inducers-was indeed free, but the mug of beer he had to buy to avail himself of it set him back a dollar, not the prewar five cents. “Christ!” he exclaimed.

“I’ll take fifteen cents in silver, if you’ve got that,” the barkeep said. “Hell, I’ll take a dime. It’s just as well the banknotes are already brown, on account of that’s what people will be using them for.”

“Don’t have enough silver to want to spend it quick,” Featherston said. “If a beer is a bean, what do I have to pay for a bed?”

“Paper? Five easy, and the bugs’ll carry your mattress in for you, you get anything that cheap,” the fat man in the black apron answered. “Why didn’t you bastards win the war instead of laying down for the damnyankees? Then they’d have to pay-”

Featherston reached across the bar and grabbed a handful of the white shirt showing above the apron. “You don’t ever want to say anything like that again, you hear me?” When the bartender didn’t say anything, he shook him, lifting his feet off the floor with no particular effort. “You hear me?”

“I hear you,” the fat man wheezed. Jake set him down on the floor. He went on, “Drink your beer and get the hell out of here.”

“I will,” Featherston said. “You ain’t crowded here. And while I’m drinking it, you keep both hands where I can see ’em, hear? You try hauling out whatever kind of persuader you got under the bar there, I promise you won’t like what happens after that.”

He took his time finishing the beer, then turned and walked toward the door. He hadn’t gone three paces before the bartender shouted, “Don’t even breathe, soldier boy!”

Featherston looked back over his shoulder and found himself staring down the barrels of a sawed-off shotgun. After gas and machine guns and Yankee traveling forts, that was not so much of a much. If the bastard did pull the triggers, it would be over in a hurry, anyway. “Fuck you,” Jake said, and kept walking.

No blast of shot tore into his back. He stood on the street for a few seconds. Five dollars for a flophouse bed? He shook his head and made for Capitol Square. Sleeping in the park was free. Maybe a congressman or a senator would come by and see what the aftermath of war looked like.

He was not the only soldier in Capitol Square-far from it. As evening fell, several campfires started flickering. That was probably against the rules, but no policemen came in to do anything about it. Jake saw them on the sidewalk and clustered around the bomb-scarred Capitol. “Cowardly bastards,” he muttered.

“Wish they would try and break us up,” another ragged veteran said. “Look at ’em there, fat and happy. Nobody who ain’t been through what we been through can know what it’s like, but we’d give ’em a taste, goddamn if we wouldn’t.”

“That’s right, by Jesus,” Featherston said. “Wonder who their pappies were, so they didn’t have to put on a real uniform.”

“Amen,” the other soldier said. “You can sing that in my church any old day.” He stuck out a hand. “Name’s Ted Weston. I’m in the 22nd North Carolina Infantry-or I was, anyways.”

“I’m Jake Featherston, First Richmond Howitzers.”

“I’ve heard of that outfit,” Weston said. “Pretty la-de-da, ain’t they? You might could have had a pappy of your own, get into a unit like that.”

“Hell I did,” Jake growled. “I was good at what I did, is all. Good enough to lead a battery for a year and a half, but not good enough to take the stripes off my sleeve and put a bar or two on my collar. La-de-da, my ass-hadn’t been for a la-de-da officer with a fancy pa gettin’ hisself killed…ahh, the hell with it.” He spat in disgust.

Weston eyed him in the dim, flickering light; they weren’t close to a fire. “Sounds like you got a powerful load of angry rilin’ your belly, Jake.”

“Oh, a touch,” Featherston allowed. “Just a touch. Don’t get me started, or I’ll sick it all up.” He waited to see if Weston would ask him more. He would have brought it all out; he might even have purged himself of some of it. But the infantryman from North Carolina shrugged and moved away.

Nobody gives a damn, Featherston thought. Nobody. He went away himself, to the base of the great statue of Albert Sidney Johnston, the Confederacy’s chief martyr during the War of Secession. The war now ended had martyrs in plenty, but he didn’t think he would see statues to them any time soon. He wrapped himself in his blanket and went to sleep.

When morning came, he found a cheap cafe, the saloons not yet being open. Ham and eggs and biscuits and coffee cost him two dollars he could not afford. He fumed at the price, as he fumed at everything these days. And then he spotted a couple of neatly turned-out sentries in front of a building at the southwestern corner of Capitol Square. Those sentries drew him as a lodestone draws nails. Sure enough, that was the War Department building, the source, as he saw it, of all his miseries and all his country’s miseries as well.

One of the sentries wrinkled his nose as Featherston approached. He turned his head and spoke to his comrade: “Dogs find more rubbish to drag out these days.”

Jake didn’t think he was meant to hear that, but hear it he did, artilleryman’s battered ears or not. “You can kiss my ass, too, pal,” he said, and started past the spit-and-polish boys into the War Department.

The one who’d spoken swung his rifle down horizontally to block his way. “Where do you think you’re going, buddy?” he demanded. “State your business.”

“Kiss my ass,” Jake repeated. “I’m a citizen of this country, and I’m a real soldier, too, goddammit. I’d rather smell the way I do than be a perfumed pansy in a uniform that never once saw dirt. Now get the hell out of my way. I aim to have me a word or two to say to the bonehead generals who cost us this war.”

“I don’t think so, sonny boy,” the sentry said. “They’ve got better things to do with their time than listen to-and smell-the likes of you.”

“Like hell they do,” Featherston said. “I want to tell you-” Without a single telltale motion or glance, he kicked the sentry in the crotch, then whirled and coldcocked his chum while the other man was just beginning to raise his rifle. The only difference between them was that the first went down with a groan, the second silently.

Whistling, Jake started to walk by them and into the War Department. Then, reluctantly, he checked himself. He’d get caught in there. He was liable to get caught out here; a couple of men were coming across the street toward him.

He did what they must have expected least-he charged straight at them. Neither of them cared to try tackling him. They were middle-aged and prosperous and no doubt thought anyone who did anything out of line would politely wait around for the police afterwards. He taught them otherwise in a hurry. Then he was back in Capitol Square, one discharged soldier among hundreds. How were they supposed to find him after that?

They couldn’t. They didn’t. They didn’t even try, and the sentries, who’d got a better look at him, were in no condition to help. He stopped running and started sauntering, looking like any of the rest of the men in the square who had more time on their hands than they knew what to do with.

At least one of those soldiers had seen what he’d done. As he strolled past, the fellow said, “Damn shame you couldn’t give that bastard Semmes a good shot in the nuts, too.”

“You’d best believe it’s a damn shame,” Jake said. “One of these days, though, if this poor, miserable country ever gets back on its feet again, we’ll pay back everybody who ever did us wrong-and I mean everybody.”

“Hope that day comes soon,” the other veteran said. “Can’t come soon enough, if anybody wants to know what I think.”

“I don’t know when,” Featherston said. “We’ll have to go some to put our own house in order, I reckon. But we’ll walk tall again one of these days, and then-and then everybody better look out, that’s all.” The other soldier clapped his hands.

Not even a funeral. Sylvia Enos thought that was worst of all. When scarlet fever took her mother, when her brother died in a trainwreck, there had been an end to things, dirt thudding down on the lid of a coffin, and then a wake afterwards. Once that was done, people had been able to pick up the threads of their lives and go on.

But fish and crabs and whatever lived at the bottom of the sea in the middle of the Atlantic were giving George the only burial he would ever get. Fishermen shuddered when they talked of things like that. Along with all his friends, George had hated the idea of going down at sea. Sylvia knew men who wouldn’t eat crab or lobster because of what the shellfish might have been eating.

She stirred the dress she’d thrown in the kettle full of black dye. It would be ready pretty soon. She’d used a good deal of coal heating water to dye clothes for mourning; that was cheaper than buying new black dresses and shirtwaists. She hoped the Coal Board wouldn’t cut the ration yet again, though.

Mary Jane came into the kitchen and said, “I want to go out and play.”

“Go on, then,” Sylvia said with a sigh. Mary Jane wasn’t really mourning; how could she mourn a man she scarcely remembered? She knew Sylvia was upset, but had trouble understanding why. George, Jr., had known his father well enough to miss him, but he was also far less wounded than he would have been had George come home every night. School seemed far more real and far more urgent to him than a father long at sea.

Sylvia wished she felt the same way. Now that George was gone, she found herself far more forgiving of his flaws than she had been while he was alive. She even-almost-wished he’d gone to bed with that colored strumpet, to give him one more happy memory to hold on to when the torpedo slammed into the Ericsson.

“Not fair,” she muttered, stirring again. The Confederacy had already dropped out of the war, and England had been on the point of giving up. Why, how, had a British submersible chosen her husband’s ship in those waning moments of the war? Where was the sense in that?

George hadn’t even mentioned British submersibles to her. All he’d ever written about were Confederate boats. Why had the Royal Navy decided to move one of theirs into that part of the ocean?

She didn’t suppose questions like that had any answers. A minister would have called it God’s will. As far as she was concerned, that wasn’t any answer, either. Why had God decided to take everybody on board the Ericsson? Because her husband had wanted to screw a whore? If God started taking every man who’d ever wanted to do that, men would get thin on the ground mighty quick.

Men had got thin on the ground. So many women wore mourning these days, or had worn it and were now returning to less somber wear. Sylvia looked at the alarm clock, which she’d brought out of the bedroom. The dress had been in the kettle long enough. Sylvia carried the kettle over to the sink and poured out the water in which she’d dyed the dress. Then she wrung the dress as dry as she could and set it on a hanger to finish drying. That done, she scrubbed at her hands with floor soap to clean the dye from her knuckles and around and under her nails.

She was just drying her hands-and noting that she hadn’t got rid of all the dye-when someone knocked on the door. Her mouth twisted bitterly as she went to open it. She’d already had the worst news she could get. Opening the door held no terror for her now.

Brigid Coneval stood in the hallway. The Irishwoman still wore black for her own dead husband. “And how is it today, Sylvia?” she asked. Where nothing else had, their common loss left them on a first-name basis. They understood each other in a way no one who had not shared that loss ever could.

“It’s…about the same as always,” Sylvia said. She stepped aside. “Come in, why don’t you?”

“Don’t mind if I do,” Brigid said. She nodded when she saw the big kettle sticking up out of the kitchen sink, which was not very deep, and smelled the acrid odor of the dye still hanging in the air. “Och, I did enough of that and to spare, so I did.”

“As long as I’m doing things, I don’t have to worry about what happened,” Sylvia said. “And so I keep finding things to do.” She waved a hand. “This place has never been so clean.”

“My flat’ll never be clean, I’m thinking, but then I’m after having three boys,” Brigid Coneval said. “But I do know what you’re saying, indeed and I do. In bed of nights, I keep thinking What if he’d stopped to piss? or What if he’d fallen down before that damned bullet came by? or-or I don’t know what, but anything to make it different than it was.”

“Anything to make it different,” Sylvia echoed. “Oh, Christ, yes. What was that stinking English submarine doing where there hadn’t been any English submarines? It had no business being in that part of the ocean. The Confederates had already given up, and-”

“It does no good-dwelling on it, I mean,” Brigid broke in.

“I know that. Sometimes I can’t help it, though,” Sylvia said. “Sometimes even when I’m working…I was thinking about that damned submarine”-she brought out the word not casually, as her friend had done, but with savage relish-“even while I was dyeing my dress.”

“It does no good,” Brigid Coneval repeated. “Well, the truth is, there’s not a thing that does any good, but there is a thing, sure and there is, that keeps you from thinking so much about it.” She opened her handbag and pulled out a flat pint bottle of whiskey.

Sylvia got up, went over to the cabinet by the kitchen sink, and brought back a couple of glasses. She watched as the coppery liquid gurgled into them. She didn’t drink that much or that often, not least because whiskey tasted like medicine to her. But Brigid was right-whiskey was medicine here, because it kept her from thinking clearly when clear thought was the last thing she wanted.

“Ahh!” Brigid smacked her lips and poured another shot into her glass. She thrust the pint toward Sylvia, who shook her head. Brigid Coneval shrugged and drank. She wasn’t shy about whiskey: on the contrary.

George, Jr., came in. “Hello, Mrs. Coneval,” he said.

“And hello to you,” she answered with an extravagant gesture that almost sloshed the refill out of her glass. “What a fine, polite boy y’are.”

The fine, polite boy had a new bruise on his cheek, very possibly gained by roughhousing with one of Brigid Coneval’s sons. He wrinkled his nose and said, “That dye stinks, Ma.”

“I know it does,” Sylvia answered. “It can’t be helped, though.” She looked toward the clock. “Go find your sister and tell her to come in. It’s later than I thought. I’ll feed the two of you and get you ready for bed. I have to go back to work tomorrow, and you’re going back to school.”

“All right,” he said, and hurried away. He liked the idea of going back to school. Sylvia wondered where he came by that. School had always bored her to tears, and George had never been any sort of scholar, either.

“A good boy. A fine boy.” The whiskey made Brigid Coneval even more emphatic than she would have been without it. She got to her feet. “You tend to your wee ones, now. I’ll have to be laying hold of mine before long, too.” Sylvia also rose. The two women hugged each other. Brigid left, heading back to her apartment with great determination.

Mary Jane was mutinous when she came back with her big brother. “Did you really tell him I had to go in?” she demanded of Sylvia, and looked surprised and disappointed when her mother nodded. Not even fried scrod for supper did much to cheer her up; she seemed convinced Sylvia had betrayed her.

Nor was she enthusiastic about going to Mrs. Dooley’s the next morning. Once Sylvia warmed her bottom for her, she moved well enough. George, Jr., got off the trolley and bounded toward his school. He’d grown tired of being cooped up at home.

At the shoe factory, everyone greeted Sylvia with a warm show of sympathy. Gustav Krafft, the foreman, was a man of few words. Even he was kind. “From your fellow workers,” he said as he handed her an envelope. It not only crinkled, but also clinked.

“Thank you so much,” Sylvia said. “Thank you all so much.” Money could do only so much, but she was glad to have it. No one could do much without it. Eventually, she would get a payment from the government, but God only knew how long that would take. If the Coal Board was any indication, it might take forever.

“You poor dear,” Emma Kilgore said. “Jack’s coming home, thank the sweet Lord, but I know how you got to feel, Sylvia, sweetheart. If it was me, I’d be out of my mind.”

“I feel like I am, sometimes,” Sylvia answered. The redheaded woman at the sewing machine next to her did not know how she felt, regardless of whether she thought she did. She was counting the days till her husband came back to Boston from Tennessee. What did Sylvia have to count? Nothing at all.

The work was steady, and demanded enough concentration that Sylvia couldn’t let her mind drift, as she often had back at the mackerel-canning plant. Thinking about anything except the pieces of leather in front of her was asking for a punctured hand. She couldn’t dwell on losing George, not unless she also wanted to dwell on what the doctor would have to do to repair her.

Toward the middle of the afternoon, the woman who had hired her came into the factory hall and said, “May I see you for a moment, Mrs. Enos?”

“Of course. Let me finish this first, please.” Sylvia joined the pieces of leather together and tossed them into the box by the machine. Then she caught Gustav Krafft’s eye. Only after he nodded permission did she rise and accompany the hiring clerk. As she did, she said, “I hope nothing’s wrong.”

“You’ve done a very good job with us, as a matter of fact,” the woman said as they left the factory floor. If she noticed Sylvia was wearing mourning, she didn’t mention it. She waved her to a chair: the very chair in which she’d been sitting, in fact, when she was hired.

“Miss, could you please tell me what’s going on?” Sylvia asked.

“Yes, I will tell you,” the hiring clerk answered. “Like I said, all the reports on your work have been very good, and Krafft isn’t easy to please. But our orders have been cut because of peace, and we have men coming back, and you are one of our most recent employees. And so-”

“You’re letting me go,” Sylvia said dully.

“I am sorry,” the woman said. “I do feel bad about it, because you’ve worked out very well here.” That did Sylvia exactly no good. The woman who’d hired her went on, “I wish we could keep you, but business doesn’t allow it. And our brave men in uniform will be returning, looking for the jobs they-”

“My brave man in uniform won’t be returning,” Sylvia broke in, “and my children and I will be going hungry because of this.”

“I am sorry,” the woman repeated. “I’ll be happy to give you the very best of good characters, which will surely help you get a position at a firm that is hiring.”

“But firms aren’t hiring,” Sylvia said. “Firms are letting people go. Firms are letting women like me go so they can hire men, like you said.” She sighed. “I’ll take that good character. It won’t do me any good, but I’ll take it.” What am I going to do now? she asked herself. What can I do now? The question was far easier to ask than to answer.

Cincinnatus was walking to the trolley stop when someone whistled behind him. He looked back over his shoulder and saw Lucullus, Apicius’ son, waving at him. He didn’t grimace-not on the outside where Lucullus could see. Instead, he waved. Lucullus came toward him at a heavy trot: he was on his way to putting on his father’s massive bulk.

“What you want?” Cincinnatus asked him. “Whatever it is, you better make it snappy, on account of I’m gonna be late for work if I miss this here trolley car.”

“Well, ain’t you high and mighty?” Lucullus said. He was getting his own man’s confidence; he wouldn’t have been so sharp with Cincinnatus a year before. “My pa says, he got to figure out whether to fish or cut bait with you pretty damn quick, an’you won’t like it if he decide he got to cut bait.”

“You tell your pa that if anything happens to me, I got myself a little book,” Cincinnatus answered. “First thing that happens after somethin’ happens to me is, that little book goes straight to Luther Bliss.” He’d been bluffing when he said that to Joe Conroy. He wasn’t bluffing any more. Anyone who tried to bring him down would go down with him.

Lucullus screwed up his face. He could see that. He was no fool; Cincinnatus would never have thought Apicius’-Apicius Wood’s-son could be a fool. He said, “My pa says you ain’t got the right attitude, Cincinnatus. You is for yourself ’fore you is for the people.”

“I take care of myself and I mind my business,” Cincinnatus said. “That’s all I want to do. That’s all I ever wanted to do. Anybody tries to keep me from doin’ that, he can get lost, far as I’m concerned. I don’t care who he is.”

“You do got the wrong attitude,” Lucullus said reproachfully. “If the proletariat ain’t united against the oppressors, it ain’t anything.”

“And what about if the party of the proletariat tries oppressin’ me?” Cincinnatus returned. Instead of answering, Lucullus made another sour face and strode off. Cincinnatus watched him go, then hurried on to the trolley stop. The Reds wouldn’t leave him alone for no better reason than that he asked them to. He knew that only too well.

He threw his nickel in the trolley fare box and went to the back of the car with something approaching relief. While he rode the trolley, as when he was driving a truck, nobody bothered him. He sometimes thought those were the only times when no one bothered him. Oh, every once in a while at home, but that wasn’t the same.

New graffiti marked several buildings along the trolley route. Some were blue X’s, others three horizontal lines of paint, red-white-red. Only after Cincinnatus had seen several of them did he realize what they were supposed to suggest: the Confederate battle flag and the Stars and Bars. The diehards were busy again, then. Others in Covington were bound to be quicker on the uptake than he was. No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than he saw a work crew splashing whitewash over one of those blue X’s. No, the Yankees didn’t miss a trick.

Somehow, Cincinnatus was not surprised to find Luther Bliss waiting at the trolley stop where he got off. The chief of the Kentucky State Police didn’t get on the trolley, either. He fell into step beside Cincinnatus as the Negro headed toward the shed where Lieutenant Straubing’s crew gathered at the start of each new run.

“Mornin’, Mr. Driver,” he said, irony in his voice at addressing a Negro by his surname. “Hope I won’t take up too much of your precious time today.”

“Mornin’ to you, Mr. Bliss,” Cincinnatus answered. “I hope you won’t, too, suh. I don’t know nothin’ more’n I did last time we talked, and the Army gets powerful riled if I’m late to work-it don’t matter how come.”

Bliss gave him a nasty glare. He’d mentioned the Army on purpose; it was the one institution that had more power in Covington than Bliss’ secret police. After a couple of silent strides, the chief said, “I’ll make you a deal-you tell me who punched that bastard Kennedy’s ticket for him and you’ll never see my face again. That’s a promise.”

Cincinnatus laughed in the aforementioned face. “You don’t know who done it, an’ the Reds don’t know who done it, an’ the Confederate diehards don’t know who done it, an’you all reckon I know who done it. Only thing I know about Tom Kennedy is that I used to work for the man.”

He knew a great deal more than that. He also knew Luther Bliss did not know how much he knew. Had the secret policeman known that, Cincinnatus would not have been heading in to work. He would have been in jail, or more likely dead.

Bliss did know he wasn’t telling everything. “You only knew Kennedy because you worked for him, what was he doing on your doorstep better than two years later?”

“Damned if I know,” Cincinnatus answered. “He got shot before he could tell me anything. Maybe he was running from the Kentucky State Police.”

“Not right then, I don’t reckon,” Bliss said. “If he was running from us, he’d have been stupid to run to you, because he must’ve known we were keeping an eye on you, too. And whatever else you could say about the goddamn son of a bitch, Tom Kennedy wasn’t stupid.”

Bliss was undoubtedly right-nobody harassing Cincinnatus was stupid. Cincinnatus didn’t say anything about that. The less he said, the better the chance the Kentucky State Police chief would give up-give up for the time being, anyhow-and go away. But Bliss, with his odd eyes the color of a hunting dog’s, stuck with him like a hunting dog on a scent. Side by side, they approached the shed where Lieutenant Straubing’s drivers gathered.

Straubing was waiting outside. “Good morning, Cincinnatus,” he said. “You’ll have to tell your friend good-bye here.”

“Good-bye, friend,” Cincinnatus said at once, smiling in Luther Bliss’ direction.

Now Bliss laughed at him. “You don’t get rid of me that easy. I have some more questions that need answering.”

“Ask them some other time,” Lieutenant Straubing said. “Nothing interferes with my men when they’re supposed to be working. Nothing. Have you got that?”

“Listen, Junior, I’m Luther Bliss, and I’m looking into a killing,” Bliss said. Maybe the Army didn’t faze him after all. Maybe nothing fazed him. That wouldn’t have surprised Cincinnatus one bit. “Far as I’m concerned, that’s a hell of a lot more important than if one nigger hops in a truck on time. Have you got that?”

Straubing wasn’t any older than Cincinnatus. He was skinny and on the pale side. And, as far as Cincinnatus could tell, he never backed down from anybody or anything. “Sounds like you’re trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge,” he answered. “Cincinnatus didn’t kill anybody. If he had killed somebody, you wouldn’t be grilling him here. He’d be in prison. If it’s about somebody else doing some killing, I think it can keep-doesn’t sound like fresh news, anyhow. Now just who’s supposed to be dead, and why do you think Cincinnatus knows the first thing about it?” That was Lieutenant Straubing to the core: methodical, precise, unyielding.

“Why do I reckon he knows something about it?” Bliss asked with a chuckle. “Because the fellow who’s dead got his head blown off right on your little darling’s front stoop, that’s why. Bastard was a Rebel diehard name of Tom Kennedy.”

“Oh. Him.” Straubing waved a hand in a careless gesture of dismissal. “You may as well leave Cincinnatus alone, if that’s what you’re exercised over. He doesn’t know anything about it.”

“And you do?” Luther Bliss asked. Calm as ever, Straubing nodded. Bliss spoke in an exasperated growl: “And how come you know so goddamn much, Lieutenant, if you don’t mind my asking, of course?”

“It’s not very hard, Chief,” Straubing answered, still calm. “I shot that Kennedy bastard myself.”

“You shot Tom Kennedy?” For once in their lives, Cincinnatus and Luther Bliss said the same thing at the same time with the same intonation: one of astonished disbelief.

But Lieutenant Straubing only nodded. “I certainly did. He needed shooting. Cincinnatus is one of my better men, and Kennedy was distracting him from his work. He might even have managed to get Cincinnatus involved in something subversive if he’d kept pestering him long enough.”

Kennedy had got Cincinnatus into several subversive things, but Straubing didn’t know that. Neither did Luther Bliss, who proved it by saying, “We’ve never pinned anything on Cincinnatus here. But you shot Kennedy, Lieutenant? Why in hell didn’t you say something about it to somebody?”

“I don’t know.” Straubing shrugged. “It never seemed that important. I was only doing my job and making sure one of my men could do his. It’s not like Kennedy was anything but a Rebel diehard. I didn’t think anything more about it than I would have thought about stepping on a cockroach.”

Cincinnatus believed that; he’d had a long time to watch Straubing’s mind work. After some small pause for thought, Luther Bliss evidently decided he believed it, too. “Lieutenant, you’d have made a lot of people’s lives simpler if you didn’t play your cards so goddamn close to your chest,” he said at last. His eyes flicked to Cincinnatus. “Reckon this fellow’d tell you the same thing.”

“That’s a fact,” Cincinnatus said. “Everybody reckoned I had somethin’ to do with it. Folks kept tryin’to cipher out who I done it for. Made my life livelier than I really cared for, believe you me it did.”

“How unfortunate.” Lieutenant Straubing looked as distressed as he ever did, which wasn’t very. “I just thought of him as rubbish who wouldn’t be missed. But if that ends Chief Bliss’ business with you…”

“Ends this business, anyway.” Bliss touched a finger to the brim of his straw hat. “Obliged to you, Lieutenant. Would have been more obliged if you’d spoken up sooner, but obliged all the same.” Off he went, brisk and competent himself. Ends this business, Cincinnatus thought. That would have to do, though it was far less than he wanted.

Once inside the shed, Lieutenant Straubing wasted no time and no words: “Let’s get moving, men. We’ve got food and munitions heading down to First Army. One more thing you need to know: with the armistice holding, we’ll be laying off our civilian drivers after this run. We’re hauling less now, and we’ll be doing it with Army personnel only from now on. You civilians have done a good job, and the United States are grateful to you.”

“What are we supposed to do now?” one of those drivers, a white man, demanded before Cincinnatus could get the words out of his mouth.

“Find other work, of course,” Straubing answered. “I wish you the best of luck, but I’m not your nursemaid.”

“Some of us got killed haulin’ for you,” Cincinnatus said. “Is that all you got to say, Lieutenant-‘I ain’t your nursemaid’?”

“Their families are taken care of,” Straubing said. “If you’d been killed, your family would have been taken care of, too. Since you weren’t, you can’t expect the government to hold your hand for you now that your labor is no longer required.”

He cared about the job. When the job was done, he didn’t care any more. When the job was done, nobody cared any more. Cincinnatus wondered where he’d find work now. He whistled softly under his breath. “God damn,” he said. “Welcome to the United States.”

Secretary of State Robert Lansing had come before the Transportation Committee to discuss the integration of the railroads in lands conquered from Canada and the Confederate States into the rail network of the USA. Chairman Taft plainly feared some members’ questions might go further afield, but fearing that and being able to do much about it were two different things. “I recognize the distinguished Representative from New York,” he said with a strange sort of polite reluctance.

“Thank you, Mr. Chairman,” Flora Hamburger said. She knew she had to follow her course with care, lest she be ruled out of order. “Now, Mr. Secretary, will these railroads be brought into our network to make trade easier with the CSA and whatever is left of Canada after peace is finally established?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Lansing paused to draw on a cigarette and to run a hand through his fine head of gray hair. “That is one of the principal purposes of the integration. The other, of course, is to provide for the defense of the United States, railroads being so important to the transport of men and materiel.” He spoke with the precision of the longtime lawyer he had been.

“I see.” Flora nodded. “And against which parts of Canada does the administration see a need for future defense?”

“Those parts not annexed to the United States or to our ally, the Republic of Quebec,” Lansing answered.

“I understand as much, yes,” Flora said. “Which parts will those be?”

“We anticipate that the Republic of Quebec will have borders substantially similar to those of the former province of Quebec,” the secretary of state said.

When he said no more, Flora asked, “And the rest of Canada?”

“Areas under military occupation, we anticipate annexing,” Lansing said. “Areas not presently occupied are being negotiated with British and Canadian representatives. Whatever we do not annex will naturally fall within our economic sphere of influence, as Holland and Belgium will fall within Germany’s and Serbia and Albania within Austria-Hungary’s.”

He made fewer bones about exploitation than Flora had thought he would. She asked, “And what of the Confederate States?”

“Again, we shall annex such land as we now hold, pending adjustments to create frontiers appropriate to our needs and acceptable to the Confederate States, which may be required to exchange territory for any we yield back to them,” Lansing said. “I remind you that this land is different from that of Canada, as it was formerly part of the territory of the United States.”

“Did we not abandon our claim of sovereignty over it when we recognized the CSA?” Flora asked sharply.

“So the Confederates now say,” Lansing returned-he might look dry and dusty, but he was dangerous, tarring her with the brush of the beaten enemy. “The view of the president is that recognition of the CSA was granted under duress and maintained by coercion on the part of the Confederates and their allies.”

“The peace, then, will be as harsh as you can make it,” Flora said.

Congressman Taft looked unhappy, but the question followed logically from others Lansing had answered without hesitation. He answered this one without hesitation, too: “Yes, ma’am. The stronger the peace from our point of view, the better off we shall be and the longer our foes will need to recover from it and menace us again.”

“Wouldn’t we be better off making them our friends?” Flora asked.

“Perhaps we might be, if they showed any interest in friendship,” Lansing said. “The next such interest they do show, however, will be the first.”

Democrats up and down the committee table laughed. Some of them even snickered. The chairman rapped loudly for order. Flora felt her face flush. The question, while heartfelt, had sounded naive. “If we do annex Canada, I expect a large influx of Socialist voters,” she remarked.

“No one, as yet, is speaking of making U.S. states from Canadian provinces, so the question of voter affiliation in them is moot,” Lansing replied. “Again, this differs from our approach to territory formerly under Confederate administration.”

“Of course it does,” Flora said. “Ex-Confederates are likely to make good Democrats, since they’re reactionary to the core.”

Taft’s gavel came down again. “That is out of order, Miss Hamburger.”

“Is it out of order to suggest that the administration will make whatever peace is to its advantage, and will worry about its advantage before it worries about the people’s advantage?” Flora asked. “Perhaps the administration is out of order, and I am not.”

Bang! Bang! Bang! Taft plied the gavel with such vigor, his beefy face turned red. “We shall have no more such outbursts,” he declared.

Flora inclined her head to the committee chairman. “Never ask any questions that might be difficult or inconvenient, is what you mean, isn’t it, Mr. Chairman?” she said. “Never ask any questions where the American people really need to know the answers. Never mind the First Amendment. Is that what you mean? If it is, Teddy Roosevelt is a lot more like Kaiser Bill than he thinks, or than he wants us to think.”

A couple of other Socialist congressmen on the Transportation Committee loudly clapped their hands, and the lone Republican with them. William Howard Taft, however, turned redder still: almost the color of a ripe beet. “It is intolerable that you should impugn the administration and the president in this way,” he boomed.

“Is it tolerable that the administration and the president should impugn the truth?” Flora returned.

She got no answer. What she got was an early adjournment of the committee. Robert Lansing stuffed papers into his briefcase and scurried away, looking back over his shoulder as if he expected dogs to come after him with teeth bared. His alarmed expression gave Flora some satisfaction, but not enough.

She went back to her office and stared in dismay at the mountain of paperwork awaiting her there. She’d wanted to go visit David at the Pennsylvania Hospital, but she wouldn’t have the chance, not today, not if she was going to do the job she’d been elected to do. Duty ran strong in her.

If she couldn’t take the time to visit, she could telephone. When the hospital operator answered, she said, “This is Congresswoman Hamburger. I’d like to speak to one of the doctors seeing my brother.” In this matter, she did not hesitate to use her influence. She could learn from the doctor, but she couldn’t make him do anything he wouldn’t have otherwise except talk to her.

“Please wait, ma’am,” the operator said, as Flora had known she would. Flora impatiently drummed her fingers on the broad oak surface of the desk.

“This is Dr. Hanrahan, Congresswoman,” a man’s voice said at last. Flora brightened; of all David’s doctors, Hanrahan seemed the most open. “We tried fitting a prosthesis on your brother this morning. The stump isn’t ready yet, I’m afraid, but he tolerated the padded end of the artificial leg better than he has. Things are healing in there, no doubt about it. And it was very good to see David upright, if only for a little while.”

Tears stung her eyes. “I wish I could have been there to see that,” she said. “How soon will he be walking? How well will he walk?”

“No way to tell how soon,” Hanrahan said. “I wish we had some better way to fight infection than we do, but his body will have to win that battle. How well…He’s always going to have a rolling motion to his stride, ma’am; that’s the way the knee joint on the prosthesis works. But I hope he’ll be able to get by without even a cane.”

“Alevai,” Flora said, which surely meant nothing to an Irishman. She returned to English: “I hope you’re right. That would help a lot.” She wondered if it would help enough for her brother ever to find a wife.

Maybe Hanrahan was thinking along with her, for he said, “A lot of good men got wounded in this war, Miss Hamburger. People won’t hold injuries against them, not nearly so much as they did before the fighting started. You don’t mind my saying so, there ought to be a law against people who do dumb things like that, anyhow.”

“I am going to write that down, Dr. Hanrahan,” Flora said, and she did. The Democrats, no doubt, would scream that such laws were not the federal government’s job. The only federal laws they liked readied the country for war. Maybe she could make them think about the aftermath of war, too.

After she got off the telephone with the doctor, she attacked the papers on her desk, only to be interrupted by Bertha, her secretary, who said, “Congressman Blackford would like to see you, Miss Hamburger.”

Flora blinked but nodded. Into the inner office came Hosea Blackford, a wide smile on his handsome face. “From everything I hear, Flora, you sent Mr. Lansing home with a tin can tied to his tail. That’s not easy; he’s a clever fellow.”

“Yes, I saw that,” Flora said. “But if he insists on treating everyone else like an idiot, he’s not as smart as he thinks he is.”

“A song one could sing about a great many people, from TR on down,” Blackford said. “But what one could do and what one does are often different. One thing you’ve become since you got here, Flora, is the conscience of the Congress.”

Nobody had ever called her anything like that before. She felt herself flush, and hoped Blackford couldn’t see her blushing. “Thank you very much,” she said at last. “I’m just doing the best I can.” Her smile was wry. “There have been times when you’ve said I was trying to do too much.”

“Not here, not now,” the congressman from Dakota answered. “Maybe I was wrong before, too. But certainly not now. You’ll have given Lansing and Roosevelt both something to think about.” He hesitated, then changed the subject: “Will you let me take you out to supper to celebrate a splendid day of witness grilling?”

Flora hesitated, too. The memory of Herman Bruck’s pestering still grated on her. But Blackford was as smooth as Bruck, back in New York City, wished he were. An invitation to supper was not necessarily an invitation to anything else (though it wasn’t necessarily not such an invitation, either). Well, she always had a hatpin. “All right,” she said.

Blackford ate shad at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, not far from city hall. “I never got seafood in Dakota, but I make up for it here,” he said. “If only oysters were in season.” Flora would never have thought of eating an oyster, no matter how secular she became. She contented herself with a beefsteak that did indeed provoke contentment.

Over supper, she told Blackford of the idea she’d got from Dr. Hanrahan. His eyes glowed. “I think we can pass that,” he said. “The Democrats won’t want people-people like us, for instance-to say they don’t care about cripples.”

“No, especially when their war made so many cripples.” Flora scowled. “And speaking against it is useless. Everyone says, ‘But we won!’ You warned me it would be that way. I didn’t believe it, but you were right.”

“I wish I’d been wrong, but that’s the way the world works.” Blackford beckoned to the waiter. “Let me have the bill, please.”

He drove them back to the apartment building where they both lived. It was natural for them to go upstairs together when their flats were across the hall from each other. “Thank you for a very nice evening,” Flora said in the hallway.

“Thank you for your excellent ideas-and for your excellent company.” Hosea Blackford tipped his hat, then leaned forward and kissed Flora on the mouth. He drew back before she even thought of yanking out a hatpin. Instead of trying to get into her apartment, he went into his own. “Good night,” he said, and shut the door.

“Good night,” Flora said, slower than she should have. She went into her own apartment, locking the door behind her. Then she sat down on the front-room sofa. Her thoughts whirled. She’d been glad of the kiss. Blackford was twice her age, and a gentile to boot. But she’d been glad of the kiss. She was too honest with herself to deny it. And she was far too surprised and confused to have any idea what it meant. She wished her family’s apartment had a telephone, but it didn’t. All she could do was go to bed and think and think and think.

After rumbling through Tennessee inside a barrel, Colonel Irving Morrell found Philadelphia mild and dry by comparison. To anyone coming from anywhere else, the de facto capital of the United States would have been its usual hot, muggy summer self. For once, Morrell was not sorry to return to the General Staff. With the shooting over, the action, such as it was, would be here.

He sat in a little room with a littler window and an overhead fan doing a desultory job of stirring the air. “Good to see you again, Colonel,” General Leonard Wood said. “You being one of our leading experts on barrels, we want your ideas on how thoroughly to restrict the CSA in building and deploying them.”

“Sir, my view on that is very simple,” Morrell said. “I think we ought to forbid them to have anything to do with barrels, on pain of war. The more of them they have, the more they do with them, the more trouble they’ll cause us. Those machines knock everything we thought we knew about defense in war into a cocked hat.”

The chief of the U.S. General Staff frowned. “That won’t be easy. They have a sizable motorcar industry. A plant that manufactures motorcars won’t have any great trouble turning out barrels, too.”

“Yes, sir, I understand that,” Morrell said. “If I had my way, though, I’d put that in the treaty: no barrels. I expect they’ll cheat, or try to cheat. As soon as we catch them at it, I’d take a new bite out of Arkansas or Texas or Tennessee-and make them cough up the barrels, too. Do that once and they aren’t so likely to take a chance on our doing it twice.”

Brigadier General Mason Patrick, who wore a pilot’s wings on his left breast pocket, said, “I told you the same thing in regard to aeroplanes, didn’t I, General Wood?” He nodded to Morrell. “Good to see there’s someone else with his head on his shoulders. We just licked these bastards. I want to kick ’em while they’re down. If they build up to where they can take another whack at us in ten or fifteen years, we’ve wasted a lot of lives since 1914.”

Leonard Wood sighed. “The other side of the coin is, if they sit tight for ten or fifteen years and then start building barrels and aeroplanes and submersibles and all the other tools of war we don’t want them to have, will we have the will to go in and set a foot on their necks, or will we say, ‘Look how much trouble we had beating them the last time. They’ve only got a few of these little toys, so why should we worry about them?’ That’s what makes me wake up sweating of nights.”

“Philadelphia is what makes me wake up sweating of nights,” said General Patrick, who had just come down from Canada.

Morrell stared at Wood in a kind of horror he’d never known on the battlefield. “Sir, as long as Teddy Roosevelt is president-”

“That gives us till March 4, 1921,” Wood broke in. “March 4, 1925, if he decides he wants a third term, and if the people remember to be grateful. After TR isn’t president any more…what then? We spent a generation twiddling our thumbs after the War of Secession. We could do it again.”

“All the more reason to punish the Rebels now, sir,” Morrell said. “The farther they have to climb, the harder it’ll be for them.”

“Bully!” Brigadier General Patrick clapped his hands together. “General Wood, this pup said it better than I could.”

“He’s a bright lad,” Wood said, and Morrell felt as if he’d been given the accolade. But the chief of the General Staff went on, “The harder we hold the Confederates down, the more we make them hate us and want to get their own back.”

“I honestly don’t see the problem, sir,” Morrell said. “They already hate us, the same way we hated them before the war. Somebody licks you, of course you hate him. What we have to do is make sure they can’t hurt us no matter how much they hate us.”

General Wood sighed again. “I’ve been in touch with General Ludendorff in Berlin. If it makes you gentlemen feel any better, our friends the Germans are having these same sorts of arguments about how rough they should be on France.”

“The CSA will have an easier time cheating than France will, though,” Morrell said.

“How’s that?” Wood said. “I don’t follow.”

“France isn’t even as big as Texas,” Morrell said.

“It is now,” General Patrick said. “We carved a good chunk off Texas when we made the state of Houston.”

“How much will Germany carve off France?” Morrell gave the man he thought was his ally an annoyed look: this was not the time for nitpicking precision. Having got the glare out of his system, he resumed: “Be that as it may, the Confederate States are a lot larger than France even after they’ve lost Houston and Sequoyah and Kentucky. They have more room to hide armaments than the frogs do.”

“And they could go down into the Empire of Mexico, too,” Mason Patrick said. “The only way we’d hear about anything down there is by luck. Hell, half the time the damn greasers don’t know what’s going on inside their own country, so how are we supposed to?”

“We have more ways than you’d think, as a matter of fact,” General Wood said. “But never mind that; I take the point. So you gentlemen agree we should squeeze the Rebels till their eyes pop, do you?”

“Yes, sir,” Morrell and Brigadier General Patrick said in the same breath.

“Well, I’m hearing that from the Navy Department, too, I will admit,” Wood said. “They want to go and bombard Charleston and Habana and New Orleans if the Rebels ever even think of building submersibles again.”

“That sounds good to me,” Morrell said.

Wood looked grim. “As a matter of fact, it sounds good to me, too. We had a destroyer, the Ericsson, torpedoed the night after the CSA quit the war. The Royal Navy swears up and down that they had no boats anywhere near her. If I had to guess, I’d say a Rebel skipper thought he could get away with one-but I can’t prove it, mind, and the Confederates deny everything.”

“I hadn’t heard that before, sir,” Morrell said slowly.

“We’re keeping it under wraps,” the chief of the General Staff said. “Don’t see what else to do. Can’t prove it, as I say.”

“Filthy piece of business.” Morrell realized his right hand had folded into a fist. He made it open. “They ever catch that Reb-if it was a Reb-they ought to hang him.”

“You get no arguments from me,” Wood said. “But back to the matter at hand. In your view, we allow the Rebs enough in the way of guns to keep order inside their borders and put up a halfway decent fight in case Mexico decides to invade them?”

Morrell let out a wry snort. “If Mexico invades them, sir, they can shout for help, as far as I’m concerned.”

As he spoke, he worried at the thought General Wood had put in his mind. How long could any country, especially a republic like the USA, keep watch on a neighbor? Sooner or later, the voters would tire of the effort vigilance took. When they did, or maybe even before they did, the one-time enemy would begin to rebuild and become an enemy once more.

“We have to do the best we can,” he said at last. “We have to do the best we can for as long as we can. If we drop the ball later on, or if our kids do, that’s one thing. But if we drop the ball now, we don’t deserve to have won the war.”

“That’s the way it looks to me, too,” Mason Patrick said. “The day the Confederate States start building aeroplanes with machine guns in them again, you’ll be able to see the next war from there.”

“Very well. Thank you for your thoughts, General, Colonel. They will go into our recommendations to President Roosevelt, I assure you,” Wood said. Morrell and Patrick stood up to go. Casually, Wood went on, “Colonel, could you give me another minute or so of your time?”

“Of course,” Morrell answered. He waited till the aviation officer had gone, then asked, “What’s up, sir?”

“Colonel, President Roosevelt has asked me to give you a choice of assignments, in recognition of your outstanding service to your country,” Wood said. “You may, if you like, remain in the field; the president is keenly aware of how much you enjoy the strenuous life, as he does himself.”

“Yes, sir, I do,” Morrell said. “I can’t imagine a choice that would be preferable to staying in the field.”

“Let me see if I can give you one,” Wood said with a smile. “How would you like to have charge of what we might as well call the Barrel Works? It’s plain the machines aren’t everything they ought to be. It’s just as plain nobody has a sounder notion of doctrine for them or more experience with them in the field than you do. What do you say to a free hand at making them better?”

“What do I say?” Morrell asked the question as much of himself as of Leonard Wood. He glared at the chief of the General Staff. “Sir, with all due respect, I say damn. That’s a job that needs doing. It’s a job I can do. It’s a job I should do, because, as you say, I can do it well.” He hesitated, grasping at a straw. “Unless you’d rather have Colonel Sherrard?”

“He recommended you,” Wood said. “His opinion was that you had a better feel for all the issues involved than he did. He said he never could have conceived, much less brought off, the crossing of the Cumberland. You did, and that makes you the man for the slot.”

“He’s extraordinarily generous.” Morrell scowled; he’d never known this mix of elation and disappointment. When would he ever get away to the woods and the mountains again? “Sir, you’re right. It’s such an important position that, if you believe I’m the best man to fill it, I don’t see how I can possibly decline.”

“I was hoping you would say that, Colonel,” General Wood replied. “The more work we do on barrels while we’re holding the Confederate States down-holding them down as best we can, I should say-the further ahead of them we’ll be, and the harder the time they’ll have catching up with us.”

“Yes, sir,” Morrell said enthusiastically. “I’ve got some ideas I want to try. And if we get far enough ahead of them, maybe they’ll never be able to catch up again.”

“You’re reading my mind,” Leonard Wood said. “That’s just what I’m hoping for.” Solemnly, the two men shook hands.

Every train that pulled into St. Matthews, South Carolina, brought a few more soldiers home, some from Virginia, some from Tennessee, some from the distant battlefields west of the Mississippi. The men in beat-up butternut tunics and trousers got off the trains and looked around the station, looked around the slowly rebuilding town, in worn wonder, as if amazed even so much peace as St. Matthews provided was left in the world.

Anne Colleton saw a lot of the returning soldiers, for she spent much of her time at the station waiting for her brother to get off one of those trains: she didn’t trust Tom to wire ahead, letting her know he was coming. And, sure enough, one morning he stopped down from a passenger car looking about as battered, about as bewildered, as any other soldier Anne had seen.

He looked even more bewildered when she threw herself into his arms. “What the devil are you doing here?” he demanded. “I wanted to surprise you.”

“Didn’t work this time,” Anne said. “I wanted to surprise you, and I got what I wanted.” She kissed him on the cheek. Some of the whiskers in the scar that seamed it were coming in white.

“You generally do,” Tom said after a moment, with more of an edge to his voice than would have been there before the war. Then he sighed and shrugged. “We-the CSA, I mean-generally got what we wanted, too. Not this time.”

“Come back to my rooms with me,” Anne said. “There’s one more thing I want, and you can help me get it.”

“Can I?” Her brother shrugged again. “I’ll come with you, though. Why not? With Marshlands burned, I haven’t got anywhere else to stay.”

He walked through the streets of St. Matthews with his shoulders slumped but his eyes darting now here, now there, ever alert, waiting and watching for shooting to start. “It’s not that bad,” Anne said quietly. “We hit the niggers a good lick not so long ago. One more good lick and they’re done, I think.”

“Wasn’t worrying about Reds,” Tom Colleton answered with an embarrassed chuckle. “I was worrying about damnyankees.” When they got back to her apartment, Anne poured him some whiskey, hoping to ease him. He drank it down, but still seemed nervous as a cat. Pointing at her, he asked, “What’s this other thing you want, Sis?”

“Another good lick against the Reds,” Anne said at once. “When we hit them from this side, they go deeper into the swamp, over by Gadsden. The militia on the other side of the Congaree are worthless. The Reds-Cassius and his pals, mind-whip them every time they bump together.”

“Get me another drink, will you?” Tom said, and Anne rose. While she was pouring, her brother went on, “How do I help you get it? I figure I do, or you wouldn’t have mentioned it to me.”

“Why, Lieutenant Colonel Colleton, of course you do,” she said, handing him the drink. “And it’s because you’re Lieutenant Colonel Colleton that you do. I want you to recruit as many veterans as you can, arm them, and take most of them across to the north side of the Congaree. Don’t you think they’d be able to clean out the nest of Reds that’s been in the swamp the past year and a half?”

“If they can’t, the Confederate States are in even more trouble than I reckoned they were.” Whiskey hadn’t fuzzed Tom’s wits; he asked, “What happens to the soldiers I don’t take over to Gadsden?”

“They stay on this side of the swamp,” Anne answered. “You drive the niggers into them, and they finish off any you don’t get.”

Tom considered, then slowly nodded. “And who commands the stay-at-homes?”

“I do,” his sister told him.

She waited for him to pitch a fit. He didn’t. “Odds are you’d be better at the job than any man I can think of,” he said slowly. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have the post you just assigned me? — driving, I mean, instead of catching.”

Anne shook her head. “You have much more real combat experience than I do,” she answered, “and you’ll be leading men who won’t know so much about what I’ve done since the uprising, because they haven’t been here to see it. I’ll keep a lot of militiamen, too. They’re used to doing what I tell them, and it should rub off on the soldiers.”

“You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?” Tom raised his glass. “Have one yourself, Sis. Seems to me you’ve earned it.”

Anne got a glass of whiskey, too, but stared moodily at it instead of drinking right away. “The one thing I don’t have figured out is how to be sure we kill Cassius. He killed Jacob and he almost killed me-and he wrecked Marshlands. He’s kept the Reds a going concern since we drove them back into the swamp, and he knows the place better than anybody. If we don’t get him, we’ll only have to go back again later on.”

“Kill the head and the body dies,” Tom said. Anne nodded. She knocked back the whiskey. It snarled its way down her throat. Tom spoke with a certain grim anticipation: “Kill enough of the body and the head won’t live, either.”

He went about recruiting with both skill and persistence he wouldn’t have shown before he’d joined the Army. Nor did he have any trouble gathering followers. The ex-soldiers hardly seemed to think of themselves as ex-; they obeyed his orders as readily as they would have done if still serving under the Stars and Bars. Anne couldn’t help noting that with a touch of resentment when she thought of the cajolery she’d had to use to get the militiamen to go along with her ideas even though they’d had none of their own.

A few Negro soldiers came back to St. Matthews, too. Tom Colleton did not recruit them-who could guess which of them had fought for the Congaree Socialist Republic? No one quite knew what to make of them or how to behave toward them. Anne vowed to worry about that later. For now, she hoped none of St. Matthews’ blacks was bringing the rebels in the swamp word of the move against them.

She and the militia and some of Tom’s recruits headed in the direction of Marshlands (and the swamps beyond) as ostentatiously as they could, hoping to draw as much attention to themselves as they could. Once at the edge of the ruined cotton fields, the veterans automatically began to entrench. She didn’t argue; in such matters, she was willing to assume they knew what they were doing.

Some of them laughed at the beat-up old aeroplane buzzing above the swamp. “Jesus, I wish the damnyankees had been flying crates like that,” a sergeant said.

“If the other side hasn’t got any aeroplanes, ours doesn’t have to be up to date,” Anne answered coolly. No one, she noted, laughed at the pair of three-inch guns that deployed behind the infantry. One veteran, in fact, respectfully tipped his tin hat to them, as to a couple of old friends.

Veterans and militiamen were still deploying when a brisk crackle of small-arms fire broke out to the north. Although Anne knew she’d chambered a round in her own Tredegar, she checked again to make sure the weapon was ready. The aeroplane flew in the direction of the shooting. A couple of minutes later, the militiamen at the field guns began banging away, presumably at instruction they got from the wireless telegraph the flying machine carried.

Perhaps fifteen minutes after that, a couple of ragged Negroes, a man and a woman, emerged from the swamp a few hundred yards from Anne. Both carried rifles; both looked around to find the best road for escape. They did not look long. They found no escape. A volley from the men in the new trenches knocked them over. The man never moved after he fell. The woman twitched for a little while, then lay still.

Before long, another pair of Negroes, both men this time, came trotting south as if they had not a care in the world. The veterans and militiamen let them approach to near point-blank range before shooting them down. A savage smile stretched across Anne Colleton’s face. The Reds had never met a trap with jaws on both north and south before.

“Come on, Cassius,” she crooned quietly. “Come on.” Some of the Negro rebels in the swamp, seeing the last bastion of the Congaree Socialist Republic crumbling, would fight to the death defending it. Having known Cassius all her life (not so well as she’d thought she did, but even so), she did not believe he would be one of them. His eye was always on the main chance. As long as he lived, he would figure, the revolution lived, too. That held an unpleasant amount of truth. He would try to escape.

A few more Reds blundered out of the undergrowth and died before the rest realized the sort of trap they were in. That was too late. By then, from the sounds of the gunfire, Tom’s men had drawn a good semicircle around them. The only way out lay to the south-and that was no way out, either.

Anne felt like Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar or Robert E. Lee. The whole design was hers, and it was working. Paint a picture? Write a book? She shook her head. Using men, not paint or words, to create…that beat everything.

But the men of the Congaree Socialist Republic had tried to create using men’s lives as their canvas, too. Now, realizing what sort of obstruction barred them from breaking free of their pursuers, they tried once more.

In their own way, they were also veterans, and veteran bushwhackers to boot. That made them too wily to charge headlong at their foes’ position. But they had to get through it, or they would never go anywhere again. At a shouted word of command-was that Cassius’ voice? — they attacked the trench line.

“Damnyankees couldn’t have done it better,” a veteran said admiringly, once the shooting was over. The Negroes advanced by rushes, one group firing from cover to let another leapfrog past them, then moving forward in turn.

A man next to Anne staggered back with a gurgling croak, clutching at his throat. She spared him not a glance-she was drawing a bead on a Red. The Tredegar slammed against her shoulder. The back of the black man’s head blew out. She worked the bolt and fired again.

For a few minutes, the fighting was very hot. The Red rebels battled for escape with desperate courage. Anne’s men had skill, anger, and position on their side. The Negroes got into the trenches even so. That was a worse business than she’d ever imagined, screams and shouts and bullets whipping-several right past her head-and the iron smell of blood and the outhouse stink of guts spilled in the mud.

The Negroes got into the trenches. They did not get past them, not anywhere. The veterans and militiamen outnumbered and outgunned them. A handful of Reds tried to flee back toward the swamp. Anne didn’t think any of them made it.

Cautiously, her men began showing themselves. They drew no fire. She went up and down the trenches, inspecting Negro corpses. She did not find Cassius’ body. Cursing, she blew out the brains of a black who wasn’t quite dead. Had the revolutionary leader slipped through her net again?

Halfway through the afternoon, the veterans who’d slogged down from Gadsden began coming out of the swamp. They had no prisoners with them. When Tom emerged, so filthy she hardly knew who he was, she cried, “Cassius got away again!”

“Oh, no, he didn’t.” Her brother grinned at her. “I shot him myself.”

All she felt was envy bitter and poisonous as prussic acid. “God damn you!” she shouted. “I should have done it.”

“Jacob was my brother, too, Anne,” Tom said quietly, and that brought her back to herself. “Anyhow, you got Cherry,” he went on. “Cassius, now, Cassius was sneaky to the last. Instead of coming south, he tried to wait for my men to go on past him. Then he could have headed north and been home free. He’d done it, in fact, or he thought he had. But I kept a few backstops, and I was one because I had to drag myself out of some quicksand. I was behind a cypress when along he came, a big smile on his face ’cause he’d outfoxed us. But not this time. I put two in his chest from inside thirty yards before he knew I was there. He was still smiling when he fell in the water. He won’t come out again, Sis.”

Anne Colleton heaved a long, long sigh. “It’s over, then-the Congaree Socialist Republic, and Cassius, too. I wonder if Scipio’s dead in the swamp with him. But I don’t care so much about Scipio.”

“Cassius was the big fish,” Tom agreed. “He’s feeding the fish now.”

“It’s over,” Anne repeated. “This whole stretch of South Carolina can start picking up the pieces now. The Confederate States will have to start picking up the pieces now.” She looked north, not into the swamp but far beyond. “We’ve got the damnyankees to catch up with, after all.”